The third vitamine recognized is the anti-scorbutic, the factor which prevents scurvy. It is found in fresh vegetable tissues, and to a less extent in fresh animal tissues. Its richest sources are cabbage, swedes, turnips, lettuce, water-cress, and such fruits as lemons, oranges, raspberries, and tomatoes; other vegetables have a less value. Fresh milk and meat possess a definite but low anti-scorbutic value. This vitamine (I am quoting the report of the Committee, which has been issued to our military, naval, and medical administrators and famine-relief-workers throughout the world) suffers destruction when the fresh food-stuffs containing it are subjected to heat, or drying, as methods of preservation. It is habitually destroyed and wasted by stewing fresh vegetables with meat for two or three hours. All dry food-stuffs, such as cereals, pulses, dried vegetables and dried milk, are deficient in anti-scorbutic properties; so also are tinned vegetables and tinned meat—hence the disgust to which they soon give rise!

The explanation of the mystery about lime-juice (which a hundred years ago was used with absolute success to prevent scurvy, and in 1875 was a dead failure) is shown by the workers at the Lister Institute to be this—namely, "lime" and "lemon" are in origin the same word, and have become applied in ways unrecognized by the Admiralty and their medical advisers in various parts of the world to which the citron, the lemon, the sweet-lime and the sour-lime—all varieties of one species, Citrus medica of Linnæus—have been carried from their original home of origin, the south-east of Asia. The original effective and valuable "lime-juice" of the eighteenth century was lemon-juice, carefully prepared from lemons in Sicily and Italy, and from 1804 to 1860 in Malta. When the demand for it increased in the nineteenth century, it was adulterated and made up from poor fruit, as the commercial enterprise of contractors and the fatuous incapacity of the naval authorities progressed hand in hand. And then, in the early fifties, the West Indian growers of the small sour-lime (Citrus medica var. acida) in Montserrat got the naval contracts, the honest intention of Sir William Burnett, the chief medical officer of the Navy, being to establish a permanent and first-rate supply. Strangely enough, the naval "lime-juice" now really was lime-juice and no longer lemon-juice. By a natural but fatal misconception, the medical value of the juice, whether of lemon or of lime, was by all authorities attributed to the citric acid present; and the only tests applied to it were chemical ones, and not therapeutic. The Lister Institute Committee have shown by therapeutic experiment—the feeding of guinea-pigs, in which scurvy can be produced and cured at will—that the anti-scorbutic vitamine remains active and unimpaired in lemon-juice from which all the citric acid has been extracted. And, further, that the juice of the West Indian sour-lime (Citrus medica acida), although very rich in citric acid, contains only one-fourth the anti-scorbutic vitamine which the same quantity of the juice of the true lemon (Citrus medica limonum) contains. This has been most carefully established by prolonged series of feeding experiments. It explains the failure of the lime-juice in Sir George Nares' Polar Expedition, and restores the confidence in lemon-juice based on the unanimous testimony of the early records of its use.

Whilst lemon-juice is thus justified, Dr. Harriette Chick has made a discovery which will go far to remove it from supremacy. She finds that an anti-scorbutic food can be prepared, when fresh vegetables or fruit are scarce, by moistening any available seeds (wheat, barley, rye, peas, beans, lentils) and allowing them to germinate. This sprouted material possesses an anti-scorbutic value equal to that of many fresh vegetables; the unsprouted seeds have none. Probably this explains the anti-scorbutic value of sweet-wort and of beers made from lightly dried malt; and the total failure in this respect of our modern beers made from kiln-dried malt. Dr. Chick, amongst many other interesting and important results published by members of the Lister Institute Committee, states that the juice of raw swedes and of raw turnips is a valuable anti-scorbutic (to be added to milk for the use of artificially nourished infants); so, she states, is orange-juice. But, contrary to the usual opinion, she finds that beetroot has little or no anti-scorbutic value. The whole subject is of extreme importance, and is necessarily in a tentative stage of pioneer experiment.

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